Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Broadcasting From Home

Editions EG - LP
US, 1984
Modern Classical / Ambient / Instrumental 

Not ambient, not modern classical, but a secret third thing: seminal British pastoral pop chamber music that would give birth to a genre on its own. Big in Japan, obviously, as well as in my heart.

Some bands change the course of pop culture history. Some do it with a bang, others, silently. That's the case of Simon Jeffes' Penguin Cafe Orchestra. They emancipated themselves from psychedelic folk & rock (Jeffes worked with Caravan & Kevin Ayers before he founded the Penguin Cafe Quartet) in a rather unexpected way in the late 1970's, assuming a classical music approach. Sheet music for a pop audience. Something that would become more common in the following decade, mainly due to the popular success of the PCO and composers like Philip Glass.

The music of PCO had a huge impact on a whole fringe of Japanese European-obsessed folk scene in the 1980's, with bands like Gontiti or World Standard sharing their own vision of green meadows and hilly British landscapes (without surprise, one song from this album was written by Jeffes and Ryuichi Sakamoto). And it has, I think, a very similar impact on my psyche, this weird impression of exoticism emanating from a music that evoked to me, on the contrary, the heart of Europa, and maybe more precisely, the familiar landscapes of Britanny, where I grew up. Exoticism of the familiar, that's what it is indeed. And listening to Broadcasting From Home today, I'm still astonished by the band's capacity to seamlessly connect E.M. Forster with 1980's Britain. Truly timeless music (VG+ / VG+)

Tracklist

1. Music For A Found Harmonium
2. Prelude & Yodel
3. More Milk
4. Sheep Dip
5. White Mischief
6. In The Back Of A Taxi
7. Music By Numbers
8. Another One From The Colonies
9. Air
10. Heartwind
11. Isle Of View (Music For Helicopter Pilots)
12. Now Nothing